Sonia Bishop

Associate Professor

Building on my initial training in cognitive/clinical psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, I was attracted by the discipline of cognitive neuroscience and spent my formative scientific years at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit under the mentorship of John Duncan. Here, I received training in functional magnetic resonance imaging and applied models from the cognitive neuroscience literature on attention to address the impact of trait differences in anxiety upon the frontal-amygdala circuitry implicated in attentional control over threat. Interspersed with my work at the CBU, I also spent periods of time in the US working with Martha Farah, Jonathan Cohen, and Jim Haxby at U Penn and Princeton University and a stint in the genetics lab of John Fossella (now at Mount Sinai Department of Psychiatry) before returning to take up a career development award at Cambridge University’s Department of Experimental Psychology, under the mentorship of Trevor Robbins. Since July 2008, I have been an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley. I am interested in trying to bring the rigor of experimental design from the cognitive literature together with recent imaging methods and an individual differences approach to study questions regarding the neural mechanisms involved in the interface of cognitive and emotional processing.